jim's blog

Valentine's Day. What a rare day in many parts of the world to say "Thank You" to your best customers, best friends and those you love the most. My old friend, Bob Valentine, now retired President of Valco Graphics in Tukwila, Washington, had a natural way of saying Thank You.

Each year, as a high-end printing firm, he produced an elegant valentine greeting and sent it to his best customers with a note that says, “With a name like mine and customers like you, every day really is Valentine's Day.”

OK. Sure, it’s easy enough for a guy with a name like Valentine, but how do you express the appreciation, respect and affection you feel to your best customers on a day honored globally as a day for expressing affection? It’s easier than you might imagine. All it takes is an intention to mold stronger ties with key individuals — a willing administratively skilled-assistant to help with the details like memory and production, and making the time and patience to sit down and write a few simple letters.

Research has shown that frequent contact between key executives of key customers is the hallmark of a healthy and growing business relationship and it seems to prove true across all cultures and all ethnic customs. As time grows progressively scarcer, finding the opportunity to make frequent, positive, intelligent and personal interactions (experiences) with even your top 20 customers used to be tough.

It was one of those critical but frequently postponed responsibilities of every customer- focused executive. I advise our clients to plan a minimum of nine ‘relationship-building touches’, evenly spaced over a period of from two years to life to ensure that the fundamentals of relationship management are covered.

While Valentine's Day is a wonderfully appropriate time to begin, nurturing touches are welcome all year round. I can think of at least nine letters that every executive could sign.

Start with a sincere Thank You letter and then at about 60-day intervals, send the following:

Like a gentle, spring shower, such contacts reinforce and articulate your interest, your values, your market position and your unique differentiation. And best of all, done in an intelligent and respectful manner.

One that says you consider them to be an “A” customer. Begin today. Start with a list naming the key person in each of your 20 best customers.

Say Thank You.  In your own words — tell the person how much this business relationship means to you personally and invite a dialogue on ways to even strengthen the bond.

Say How’m I Doin?   It’s not necessary to send a massive customer opinion survey. Just a sincere letter that tells them why you are asking the five questions you’d like addressed. You pick the questions — what do you really what to know? Make the scoring simple as 1 – 5 or A, B or C. Assure the reader you will personally review and act on any comments they make. And offer a summary of findings to those who respond

Say What do you think?  Ask their opinion about products or services before you change or add them. They’ll tell you the truth and will usually become your earliest adopters if you are right.

Say I thought about you today.  Send a relevant, visionary book or even an executive summary as a gift. A simple, brief note that says “I read this the other day and thought about you (or our customers) and wanted you to have a copy.”

Say How can I help?  Offer to refer or introduce them to your contacts. Ask them to profile an “A” prospect from their perspective and allow you to suggest appropriate introductions. A basic law of the harvest suggests you feed before you reap and the law of reciprocity almost guarantees the favor will be returned. 

Say Have you seen this?  Stay on the lookout for articles, books, or even individual press mentions. (Google Alerts) A brief note attached to the article says volumes in a short space. It’s a relevant touch that reminds without pressure.

Say Come Join Us!  Invite your top 20 to an event at least once a year. It can be a personal and individual appreciation luncheon, a new product launch, an introduction to a VIP event or virtually any reason to ask people to join you and to feed them. It’s an ancient and proven ritual that fuses people together.

Say Here’s 21 Tips.  Every firm has developed, over time, their own unique compendium of great tips, tricks, solutions, ideas, and clues to solving major problems for their customers. Have a list of these nuggets compiled, edited and printed. They make a useful, intelligent and appreciated gift that keeps you in front of their mind often.

Say We’re here for you.  Find unique ways to express your values without your having to say them about yourself. I found a great little book called “Whatever It Takes,” (www.compendiuminc.com) and in 128 pages, there are over 300 powerful quotations on the topic of the simple value of going the extra mile. Naturally, as the sender, you get attached to the values enclosed and with every reading, you reinforce on their mind one of your key attitudes about your relationship — doing whatever it takes. Oh, and by the way, you can automate the entire process.

While every day is rarely Valentine's Day, every day our key customers, employees and fans need tangible reminders that we care and that we take them seriously. Like an ardent suitor, a campaign of personalized contacts will allow you to pursue, persist and inspire customer loyalty with professional and appropriate persistence.

What would happen if you made this Valentine's Day the day you commit to intentionally touching at least, your personal most beloved one, your top 20 customers, your valued employees and even your key suppliers and alliances, and make those contacts ones that matter.
If words fail you, you can find letters like these and many more in our eBook, 101 Business Love Letters. 

So, a warm, Happy Valentine's Day to you and to nurturers, everywhere.

~ Jim 

Let me share a story that taught me worlds about nurturing relationships. I'll explain.

For most of the last 22 years I have had the privilege of traveling the world studying, speaking and consulting on the concept and methodologies involved with authentic Nurture Marketing. Nurture Marketing is about caring, in your “heart of hearts” about your clients, employees and prospects and about communicating well the services and products you provide for them.

Let's say you are the perfect fit for what your clients need and you know it, your challenge is that everybody is saying pretty much the same thing. Nurture at the technical side is about the process of automating your communications to stay in touch with precisely the right people, with exactly the right message and always at just the right time and done so, all the time.

Many years ago I had the opportunity to speak at a marketing conference in JiuZhaiGuo located in the newly emerging western Chinese Province of Chengdu. One beautiful afternoon a couple of us were offered a personal tour of a living black bamboo farm that transformed my belief in the connection of nurturing with the spirituality of nature.

Bamboo is a pivotal commodity in the Chinese economy used almost exclusively to provide scaffolding for high-rise building construction. Our 75 year old guide, Ping-Sun (Peter) Liu informed us that our rickshaw tour would include fields illustrating the various stages in the 5-year growth cycle of black bamboo.
 
This special species of bamboo is and has been vital in the economic development and construction of this rapidly expanding giant country. China is a vast country, with a huge, rapidly expanding, population but you would not know it from the first fields we visited. Extending as far as the eye could see was an empty field of rich, black, tilled earth. Not a single bamboo plant was in sight, not even a tree. Peter explained to us that the field had been sown a few weeks prior. Each of over a thousand farmers carried a heavy satchel of seeds, water and fertilizer on their backs. He explained the great care need necessary at this step in the process.

Bamboo seeds need to be carefully identified and culled, planting only those seeds that appear to have the best chance for sprouting, each perfectly positioned by hand in the ground, not too deeply and never too shallow to prevent attack from the competitive birds and scavenging rodents.

Also of importance are the placement of each seed a precise distance from one another; if placed too closely the plants will compete with each other for food and water and not grow to their full potential.  Too far apart and you will have an inefficient root-system and ultimately a poor harvest.

Once placed in the ground, each seed is individually fertilized with a deep drink of water and a handful of fertilizer from the farmer's heavy satchel. The process of watering and fertilizing is ritually carried out weekly on a seed by seed basis for nearly five years. No heavy machines, no modern irrigation equipment just individual farmers carefully tending the individual needs of each seedling in the field. About a mile down the dusty road was a field that Peter told us had been sown two years prior. When we reached our destination we were surprised to see what looked to us like thousands of farmers working in an empty field.

Our big surprise was when Peter told us that every week, up until the 11 month of the 5th year the bamboo fields appeared visually barren. In the 12th month of the 5th year the black bamboo would suddenly sprout and very rapidly grow up to 60 feet in just under 30 days. By now we were tired of the hard seats of the wagon seat and I was anxious to see a fully developed bamboo field ready for harvest. On the way to the final stop, we passed a field covered by heaps of broken bamboo that looked as if a tornado had laid waste to a fully mature black bamboo crop. When we questioned Peter on what we were convinced was a bamboo plague or at the very least a natural disaster. With a disgusted scowl, he spat loudly and answered simply, “stupid farmer”.

He explained that the farmer working this particular field had not nurtured his crop weekly but every other week and had used the wrong fertilizer resulting in a black bamboo crop with root systems so weak that the entire field was blown down in a wind storm so it could not be sold and needed to be destroyed. He repeated, “five whole years wasted! Stupid farmer”!

When we reached the last huge expanse of green on the trip we were greeted with a massive field full of strong and very tall black bamboo and left me with the feeling that our guide Peter taught us some very valuable lessons about Nurture Marketing.

• Having a long-term plan is essential to reaching your goals in both endeavors.
• You must choose your seeds very carefully with a clear understanding of a your desired harvest outcome.
• You must understand what each and every one of your seeds need to grow and thrive.
• Each seed needs its own species-specific formula of water, fertilizer and caring to be successful.
• Each plant in your garden has its own unique life cycle and trying to rush a crop to harvest will result in disaster.
• Trying to shortcut the laws of the harvest will also result in disaster.
• The harmony of nature can be applied to business and that true nurturers are all ‘Farmers at Heart.’

Good Nurturing!

~ Jim